Money is a social contract

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Brian Albrecht is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota and a graduate of the Barcelona GSE Master’s Program in Economics of Public Policy, as well as a past editor of the Barcelona GSE Voice. He is also a contributor to the Sound Money Project, a blog from the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).

In two recent articles, he talks about money as a social contract, both from a normative and a positive perspective:

“Both monetary theory and social contract theory consider a hypothetical situation (a model) in which people in a society come together and collectively agree on some social institution. I have argued that both social contract theorists and monetary theorists use these hypotheticals to draw normative conclusions about what types of institutions are preferable. However, part of monetary theory is also concerned with the positive (i.e., not normative) question “Where does money come from?” In a similar way, part of social contract theory is concerned with the positive question “Where does the state come from?”